Yo Dawg, We Pimped Your Car With Cardboard

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There is a hero among us. He ambushes the most ordinary of autos in the dead of night and pimps them out in a style worthy of Xzibit.

Our hero is Max Siedentopf, who felt that not nearly enough people customize their cars and give them the love and attention they deserve. Having already pimped his own rides—a banana skateboard and a zebra bicycle—he decided to pay it forward by targeting snooze-worthy cars around Amsterdam. "I tried to think of a way to make the most ordinary cars for just a few euros into their own supercar," he says.

Siedentopf focused his clandestine customizing on his neighborhood in west Amsterdam. He preferred the area's industrial landscape over the city center, where the canals and bridges were "too beautiful." Staying close to home also eased the schlep of hauling all that cardboard around.

He prepared his makeshift grills, fenders, spoilers, and scoops the night before his surreptitious silliness. He's awake at 4:30 am and set out on a guerrilla raid. He worked in the wee hours for privacy and because he liked the twilight just before sunrise. "The tricky thing about that though was that I never had that much time before it got too bright," he says.

Siedentopf also had to move like lightning to ensure he wasn't caught by an irate car owner. From tape to shutter snap, each masterpiece took under 10 minutes, which is why he calls the project Slapdash Supercars. Late night revelers heading home from a party caught him in the act on two occasions, but no one ever ratted him out.

After adding the cardboard mods to a car, Siedentopf snapped a few frames with his Canon 5D Mark III and a flash. The aesthetic heightens the DIY humor of it all. "I like this very rough and blunt direct lighting," Siedentopf says. "I like that it has an amateur feel to it. I think people that don’t have that much to do with photography can relate to that well."

Siedentopf photographed nine cars and called it done because he didn't think more photos would add anything to the concept. He was most interested in the creativity of the project, nothing more. "For me, the most important thing is the idea and not what medium it is. Sometimes it’s taking photos, other times making music videos or weird products. This time pimping cars and documenting it felt like the right thing," he says.